A DIY roadtrip

At last, I understand the deep spiritual impact of going on a pilgrimage. I may not yet have walked to Chimayó or flown to Spain to walk a month in that other famous pilgrimage. But I have, finally, in a moment of personal crisis, paid my first visit to IKEA and there found fulfillment and meaning.

Or at least a couch, which is precisely what I went there for and is more or less the same thing.

Important to note is that no IKEA has taken root here. I have never lived any place with an IKEA. IKEA, to me, has always been on par with the Library of Alexandria or the Super Bowl: I’m more likely to drink from a coffee mug from there than to actually go there myself.

So this was a somewhat unanticipated pilgrimage. But I was temporarily couchless, which was indeed a personal crisis. In a moment of spontaneity and riding a sugar high, three of us decided to jump in my car together and drive to this place of legend and wonder: me, my beloved, and our good friend – let’s call her Lauren Thirdwheel.

To the best of our knowledge, the nearest IKEA was in Centennial, which anyone not from Denver would call “Denver.” All I knew to suspect from the experience was stereotype. Screws missing from the assemble-it-yourself furniture kits. High odds I would be single before emerging back into the sunlight. Swedish meatballs. 

Nothing prepared me for my first impression of the actual building. It appeared larger than most municipal airports, including runways. But unlike most airports, the parking was less than $20 a day.

We got through security just fine and made our first IKEA stop at the bathroom. This turned out to be wise for two main reasons:

1) I thought the pilgrimage took place TO the store. I was wrong. It takes place THROUGH the store.

2) Along this pilgrimage, the vast majority of the bathrooms are for demonstration only and – probably for this reason, at least in the U.S. – lack toilets.

Immediately after using the legitimate bathroom, my senses were overwhelmed by the magnitude of this mecca. 

If you, like me, have not yet been to an IKEA, you may not realize that this place doesn’t work like other warehouse retailers. For starters, there were no free food samples. You also preserve the sensation of browsing while in truth you follow a prescribed path through comfortable showrooms designed, no doubt, by ruthless and well-compensated psychologists.

This setup means that if you, like me, enter IKEA knowing almost certainly which couch you are buying because your beloved looked it up online for you – and all you need to do is sit on the couch to make sure your dog will like it – and the demo couch lives in a demo room not five minutes from the entrance – and you in fact like the couch and agree to purchase it with money—you can’t.

Rather, you must complete the ENTIRE PILGRIMAGE, past many couches you like less and many fabricated living and dining spaces, each one accented, for some reason, by the same set of Swedish-designed ceramic cactuses. Only then are you able sit and eat meatballs with peas and lingonberry jam that keep you from getting hangry enough to quit everything.

By this point, I imagine our friend Lauren Thirdwheel was wondering why she had sacrificed the first half of her week to watch my beloved and me make eyes at each other over ottomans with built-in storage. But I’m glad she did. She is our eyewitness. She could vouch, under oath, that our relationship defied stereotype and grew stronger while my beloved tried sitting criss-cross applesauce in every chair available in Denver. She could further vouch that it was my beloved who suggested we also order macaroni and cheese like real adults before my blood sugar tanked even harder.

Eventually, lost in time without windows, we reached the final gauntlet. There, we could start collecting all the cactuses and other carryable items we’d been admiring on our trek. The psychologists make certain that numbers by this point hold no meaning. A $5 throw pillow seems as sensible as a $4,000 vanity mirror. Without access to accountants and bank accounts, or measuring tapes and actual dimensions of the car you drove in, numbers become Scandinavian abstract art. 

We checked out with a few accessories and a pallet of lingonberry jam. The couch, disassembled in its box, would be waiting for us at a loading dock, which was a clue none of us picked up on. I being my beloved’s beloved, carried the awkwardly L-shaped box with her chair in it through the parking garage to the car. The car was right where we’d left it. But it was … smaller than any of us remembered.

This is a photograph of the couch in its box. Please remember that I do not drive a semi-truck and have some compassion for me.

Luckily, IKEA is a less evil corporation than it could be. They do not charge more for shipping after customer reevaluate their automotive dimensions than they charge beforehand. Fulfillment and meaning: my order was fulfilled, which meant a lot to me.

And since I was springing for delivery anyway, we decided I should go ahead and order a desk and some bookshelves. By which I mean, Lauren and I decided that. My beloved opted to wait in the car with her new chair. She knew my meatballs were wearing off, and some spiritual pilgrimages benefit from knowing when to call it quits.

– Zach Hively